by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

I bought our chickens a bunch of dill at the grocery store the other day. I have completely cracked.

I was wandering around, trying to drum up some lunch, and I couldn't help but check out the fennel selection, just to see if there was anything that our flock would like. The fennel was OK, but didn't have as much of the feathery foliage tops as I would have liked; plus, it was $4.99 a pound, which is a lot for a weedy free-ranger that grows, literally, on the sides of highways. But right next to the too-expensive fennel was a gorgeous, full bunch of dill. $2.99. I bought it, along with some clam chowder.

Note, I did not purchase a vegetable for me to eat. Just for the chickies. Like I said, cracked.

And, just as I suspected, the dill is a hit. Certainly $2.99 worth of fun.

We're slowly learning about the chickens palates. They seem to like most plants in the carrot family, which includes their beloved fennel, dill, carrot tops, parsley, and celery greens. As best I can tell, their general rule is: Bitter is better.

Their patch of arugula has been plucked bare (the peppery green is their absolute favorite; we've re-planted, but germination takes time), so we've been saving scraps from the test kitchen to satiate their need for greens. At various times, Sunset staffers have brought in lovingly saved leaves of soft butter lettuce or mild red-tinged Oak Leaf lettuce; the chickens have been shockingly ungrateful. But give them some bitter carrot tops and they're in chicken heaven.

To be perfectly honest, though, our girls are happiest to munch sow thistle or a weedy grass that's popping up everywhere around their coop. (Our best Sunset garden minds think it's quack grass; we think the seeds came from the straw we're using in their coop.) They love weeds. (I tasted them myself; the grass is not delicious, but the sow thistle isn't bad. Not that I'm advocating eating random plants that pop up in your garden, because I'm not.)

In other chicken-related news, I'm sorry to report that the chickens and I have fallen out of love. I'm still happy to drop a few bucks for the joy of having them rush over to eat dill out of my hand, but as they grow older (They're all of 15 weeks old now) they've gotten skittish. And a little unfriendly. For a while I was letting Honey hop up onto my lap so I could stroke her golden, soft, marvelous feathers as I fed her. Then we had an ... incident, shall we say, that ended that practice. How to put this? Both ends of Honey's digestive system were working at once. Onto my lap. Let me tell you, from the front lines, that chicken
poop is smelly but washes out in the laundry perfectly.

Ease of laundering aside, that little incident was enough to prompt me toward thoughts of roasting our little friends, perhaps with lemon and rosemary. (Weird how most people eat chicken nearly every day, but when you think about eating chickens you personally know you start to sound like Hannibal Lecter.)

Then, a mere two days later, the other Buff Orpington, Charlotte, pecked my back so hard that she broke the skin as I was crouching down to feed one of the others some greens. (Broke the skin just a tiny bit. But that was enough for me to wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, convinced that I had somehow contracted salmonella.)

Since then, the chickens and I have had a strict hands-off policy. Fellow chicken-wrangler MacKenzie Geidt and I still visit them in the afternoons and give them something good and green to eat, though. We also check the nesting box daily, to see if this is the day that the hens start laying eggs. So far: nothing. They're 14 and 15 weeks old, which is actually a little young. (Most chickens start laying when they're 4 to 6 months old, but the fact that it's winter now may interfere with that timeline.)

No eggs yet.

By Rachel Levin, Sunset associate travel editor

We’ve got a U-Haul, buckets, gloves, spigots—and coffee—for tomorrow’s early morning drive down to Santa Cruz. We’ll be happily picking olives alongside the folks at Valencia Creek Farms, who’ve been kind enough to sell us 800 pounds of their olives—and let us help out. With Sunset’s olive trees out of commission thanks to a serious olive fly infestation, we have no choice but to borrow.

Working on a bit of a time crunch, we’ll pick olives for only a couple of hours—and then cart our fruit over to Pietra Santa Winery, in nearby Hollister, for pressing. (Stopping along the way, of course, for a quick lunch at Cafe Sparrow, in Aptos.) After the press we’ll haul our oil back to a cool, dark corner here at Sunset, where our containers will sit for roughly 45 days. Stay tuned for more!

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

The back parking lot at Sunset has gone from crush pad to pressing station.

Once the sugar levels in our wine got down pretty close to zero (okay, the hydrometer still read 1 degree Brix, but with Syrah, fermentation can finish up after pressing), we called our thoroughly equipped friend Dan to pack up his old Italian bladder press and come on over.

He appeared with a dizzying array of glass containers—besides two 12-gallon carboys, many smaller versions and even a collection of empty magnums. As I found out later from Laurie Hook, winemaker at Beringer in St. Helena, in winemaking, “You can’t be too rich, too thin, or have too many small containers.”

It turns out that even when the pros press, they don’t end up with an amount of wine that conveniently fits into their available barrels. They need to keep smaller amounts to top off the barrels as the wine levels drop, from evaporation and sampling. And we needed the right combination of containers to be able to fill everything to the top. We knew that, because Dan kept chanting, “Once you press, oxygen is your enemy.”

We rinsed everything with a metabisulfate solution, organized a bucket brigade from the spout of the press to our carboys (taking care to have funnels in place), and started scooping the must into the basket of the press. Our Syrah flooded out the bottom—almost all of it before we even turned on the water to fill the bladder and do some actual pressing. Free-run, it’s called, and considered superior to later batches that have been firmly pressed off the skins and seeds.

Dan had warned us of how fast the process can deteriorate into a Keystone Cops routine if you don’t concentrate on smoothly switching out buckets under the spout—or drink too much too soon—so we staunchly resisted the urge to consume large quantities of the inky, yummy-looking stuff.

But only for so long. We happened to have plastic cups standing by, and they slipped under the spout of the press awfully easily. I tell you, this wine might be a work in progress, but it has the potential to be very good! It’s dense and full of dark fruit—a Syrah Michael Martella up at Thomas Fogarty (source of our grapes) just might be proud of.

That’s counting our chickens, though, which is outside Team Wine’s union contract (this one-block feast has another team for that). So we reined in our enthusiasm and got busy cleaning up the parking lot, which we’d once more turned into a red zone. With carboys topped up and fermentation locks in place, we can only wait now until the malolactic fermentation is completely done before sterilizing the wine again and letting it settle down.

Postscript: A few days after we pressed, Jon Priest, winemaker at Etude in Carneros, asked me how our wine was coming along. I didn’t quite want to make a judgment call about it in front of so talented a pro, so I said, “Well, it’s dry anyway …”

He surprised me with, “Congratulations! That’s the whole battle right there.” And he added a tip that might get our wine through the winter: If you sample out of a carboy, lower the surface level, and don’t have any extra to top it off, just sink some marbles in the wine to fill up the space. Those real winemakers—they have a few tricks up their sleeves!

By Sara Schneider, Sunset wine editor

I don’t know how winemakers get any sleep in the fall, what with worrying about birthing their wine—because it’s alive. I’ve never realized before what a seething mass of molecular interaction and chemical processes a vat of juice turning to wine is.

Things happen, whether you act or not: Color and flavor compounds start leaching out of the skins and seeds, and you have to decide whether you want to maximize or minimize that. Bacteria can start growing; how do you control something you can’t see?

I woke up in a panic at 3:00 in the morning three days into cold-soaking our Syrah (holding off fermentation to extract color and flavor before there’s alcohol in the formula), sure that we’d gone too far—that the breezeway where our drums of wine were are just too warm, and we were either going to end up with an over-the-top fruit bomb, or a stinky mess from bacteria that took it south. And then there was that e-mail I got from a friend, forwarding a winemaker’s opinion that cold-soaking in general destroys any chance of capturing terroir in a wine. Too late!

So we inoculated it the next day with yeast to get our fermentation off the ground. Simpler than making bread! You just sprinkle the granules into warm water to wake them up, then drizzle the slurry over your must. Our mentor Dan Brenzel’s advice was to not stir it in immediately, considering that we had doused the vats earlier with sulfur dioxide. What was meant to discourage bacteria could also kill yeast; we needed to let it acclimate. But as soon as the yeast began eating the sugars in the top layer of must (fermenting, in other words), we mixed it in.

Then, as the carbon dioxide created by the process began pushing the skins and seeds to the top, we started a regimen of punch downs to keep that cap from drying out (which can launch a whole new ecosystem of unwanted microbes) and to extract more color and flavor.

Nothing’s simple, though. Punching down the cap is straightforward enough, but how many times a day do you do it? Is your fermentation generating enough heat to extract a healthy amount of whatever it is you want from those skins and seeds, but not too much? More lost sleep.

And as it turned out, our fermentation was agonizingly slow. We measured the sugars daily, looking for them to drop from a starting point of 27 degrees Brix to zero, but they just inched down—24, 21, 19 … And we were a week into this. Convinced that the breezeway was just too cool (even though it had seemed too warm while we were trying to cold-soak), we moved our vats into the building and turned up the heat in that corner. Better—our fermentation temperature hit almost 80 degrees.

And in the middle of this primary fermentation, we had to think of another—the malolactic fermentation that red wine (and some white) needs to go through to change its harsh malic acid into softer lactic acid.

To start that, we made another run to the winemaking shop for some ML “bugs,” or bacteria. Strange, adding bacteria to our wine when we’d gone to great lengths to keep bacteria from growing in it until now. Some are good; some are bad …

In the end, it was a good two weeks before our sugars were down to 1 degree Brix. The malolactic fermentation was still raging, but that could finish in the carboys. Time to press.

By Rachel Levin, Sunset associate travel editor

Our hearts had fallen along with our infested fruit—but thanks to Valencia Creek Farms, Team Olive lives on! Chris Banthien has offered to sell us 800 pounds of her Santa Cruz-grown Tuscan blend of olives, including Ascolano, Pendolino, Maurino, Taggiasca, Frantoio, and Leccino varietals.

If we can’t use our own olives, at least we’ve found the next best thing: fruit from just 30 miles south. A far cry from “one-block”—but what can you do? As we’re learning, eating locally has its challenges.

Once Chris gives us the heads-up on her harvest time—should be sometime in the next couple of weeks—we’ll head down to Valencia Creek Farms and start picking. “Bring as many folks as you like!” she says laughing. “We’ll take all the help we can get.”

It’s the least we can do.

by Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

At first we thought our olives were just ripening very fast. They had turned color and were dropping from the trees in mid-October, weeks before we thought they would be ready. How naive we have been. Deborah Rogers, from The Olive Press, in Sonoma, has concluded—after we sent her samples from our trees—that we are infested with the infamous olive fly. Not only are all of our 21 olive trees riddled with olive-fly worms, but we are the proud owners of “the worst infestation” Rogers has ever seen.

Lucky us.

Our dreams of easily picking and pressing a wonderful olive oil from Sunset’s own back yard have been extinguished. But that’s not even the saddest part of our present situation. Evidently, if we ever hope to harvest the olives in the future, we need to pick all of this year’s crop of deformed, grotesque, and worm-rotted olives and destroy them. The irony here is that this year’s olives are the bumper crop of crops.

There are three ways to destroy the harvest we have. We can bury the olives, burn them, or bag them in large plastic sacks and set them in the sun for a few weeks to roast. This will encourage our olive trees to produce fruit in the spring right on schedule and also prevent the worms currently residing in the fruit from hibernating all winter only to reinfest in the spring. It will also make us a considerate neighbor to anyone in the area who may also be trying to rid their crops of the persistent insect.

If all goes well, we can start spraying our trees with an enzyme or good old-fashioned (and rather unsightly I am told) clay. Both of these organic materials discourage the olive fly and, with luck, will help ensure a decent crop next year. What we don’t know is how much money and time is that going to take. We’ve heard the sprays are expensive and need to be applied on a regular basis.

In the meantime, we need to find a local grower with an abundance of fruit to buy from and figure out the best way to crush those olives in the next few weeks before we miss the season altogether.

If anyone has an extra 800 pounds of high-quality olives lying around, let us know. At this point we have an unwavering need to make something. Too bad we can’t bottle determination, Team Olive would have a cash crop on its hands.